


With the Skin of Our Teeth

by eggstasy



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: M/M, Pre-Chorus trilogy, Pre-Season 11
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-12
Updated: 2015-09-12
Packaged: 2018-04-20 11:30:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4785764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eggstasy/pseuds/eggstasy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Something in his head that sounds like it could be Wash says 'Get up.  Assess the situation.  Formulate a plan of action.  Execute.'</p><p>Tucker decides to just work on the first part of that, if only to find somewhere he can crawl to get away from those goddamn alarms.</p>
            </blockquote>





	With the Skin of Our Teeth

Tucker wakes up with the taste of copper in his mouth and the sound of sirens muffled, like he'd stuffed cotton in his ears. Like he'd drunk too much and he's still drunk; not fun drunk but sick drunk, passed out on the bathroom floor instead of in bed with some semi-hot girl who'd looked way hotter after four tequila shots.

His fingers slip over the ground and he looks down but there's not enough light. There's just enough from the alarm nearby for him to see something shiny; fluid? Something from the consoles? What the fuck would have that much liquid in it on the flight deck?

 _Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter._ Tucker shakes his head and regrets it almost immediately, hands to his helmet as he curls up on the ground. The alarms still blare, still annoying even muffled and he wishes he could shut them off or go deaf spontaneously because they're fucking _grating_ and making him feel like he NEEDS to move when all he wants to do is lay here and die.

Something in his head that sounds like it could be Wash says _Get up. Assess the situation. Formulate a plan of action. Execute._

Tucker decides to just work on the first part of that, if only to find somewhere he can crawl to get away from those goddamn alarms.

Everything around him flickers. There's a fire somewhere but the world is dark, really dark. Nighttime? No, there's no- fuck, his memory is foggy. He remembers taking the picture, shaking that old guy's hand. He remembers their fifteen minutes of fame before they were dumped onto the spaceship to go home, wherever that's supposed to be. They're leftover pieces of a puzzle the UNSC would rather throw away.

He was going to visit Junior and then work on what to do from there. He'd had _plans,_ god damn it.

_Assess._

They were on the ship. The ship- the alarms. Right. The ones that sounded before are sounding now. The ship must have gone down. It's not moving and there's fire and- oh shit, oh shit, Tucker presses a hand against a ruined console as he pushes himself up onto shaking legs, because the hot chick who was sitting in the navigator's chair only has one half of her head left, the rest caught beneath a metal support beam to her left. Oh shit. Oh shit oh fucking shit-

Tucker turns away, just turns that off and turns away. He- _assess, assess the situation._ He needs to find Wash and Caboose, and the Reds. Carolina. Church.

Too late he remembers his helmet lamps and he's sprawled over the ground when they come on. The shiny stuff on the floor had been blood, of course, and Tucker sees the body of the guy who'd been telling him about the GPS. There's blood coming out of him but Tucker doesn't look long enough to see from what. He can't. The guy's fucking dead.

It's got to be hours before Tucker moves again, pushes himself up because he's not going to get less hurt just laying here. He wants to pop his helmet off and spit but he doesn't know if there's even air in here. There's definitely gravity; he can feel it pulling on him, sliding him across the tilted floor. It's definitely not the vacuum of space, so hopefully there's at least oxygen coming in from somewhere so he doesn't fucking suffocate.

Tucker pulls himself up to his feet and starts to walk. His radio only feeds him static, even as he tries all available frequencies so he'll just have to find everyone the old fashioned way.

* * *

 

Tucker finds Sarge first and the old bastard's awake, trying to shove a beam beneath a hunk of titanium plating like he's actually gonna lift the fucking thing. "Sarge," Tucker croaks and the soldier whips around, grabs his armor and pulls him over.

"Put your back into it, Blue," Sarge growls and when Tucker sees a glimpse of maroon armor under the plating he figures out why Sarge is so desperate. They huff and wheeze and struggle and Tucker wishes they'd found Caboose first because at least with just this one thing, he'd be really helpful, but they manage. They manage and the alarms are still blaring and he expects Simmons to be dead but he groans when Sarge reaches down and starts slapping the side of his helmet.

Tucker leaves him there and goes looking again. He finds a lot of dead UNSC personnel. He doesn't find any living ones.

Past the engine room and closer to the backup generators his headlamps catch on something ghostly white and for just a second Tucker's heart is in his throat when he thinks _Church_ but of course it isn't. Wash is slumped against a wall like he'd just fallen asleep there, and he wakes up the second Tucker touches his shoulder like he was just waiting to be found.

"Find anyone else?" Wash asks, voice way crisper than it should be after coming out of blackout unconsciousness, too professional for the encroaching panic brought on by trauma that Tucker figures he's got coming for him in about twenty-four hours. He tells Wash about Sarge and Simmons over in the engine room but no Grif, no Caboose, no Carolina and Church.

Wash suggests they split up and Tucker does it just so he doesn't have to hear that steel-and-ice tone, that 'get it done' soldier voice that Wash uses that reminds Tucker of the time Simmons told him about Wash just shooting Donut point-blank, _pop_ in the chest like it was no big deal.

Tucker goes back to check on Sarge and Simmons and finds them gone, hunts them down because more than likely they're looking for Grif. Grif is in the server room near the quantum blue box and Simmons is pulling as much of him into his arms as he can. For a second Tucker freezes, wondering if Grif is dead and Simmons is freaking out but then Grif's feet shuffle and oh, _oh_ okay, Simmons is just trying to get him onto his feet. "Have you guys found Carolina or Caboose?" Tucker tries. Sarge grunts his 'no' sounding grunt.

**"Tucker!"**

Wash's voice sounds like the alarms and Tucker runs. Trips but runs, slides on the blood from one of the soldiers who'd asked him about his family -she'd been decorated, she was an escort, she was old enough to be his mother and acted like it too- and turns, bangs against the wall to the guest quarters and thinks he leaves a dent. The floor is at an angle and he has to shuffle over and Wash calls for him again, there's another fire somewhere down the hall and makes everything flicker like the inside of a funhouse.

The alarms are louder -or Tucker's hearing is finally clearing- and he rounds the corner and he starts to hear other stuff too; the crackle of fire, the hum of something not quite broken still vibrating through the walls and the floors, Wash murmuring low inside one of the guest quarters and panting and-

The lights of his headlamps catch on the tall thing first and he follows it down. It runs into Kevlar between plates of regulation blue and it looks like a pipe, like maybe the support framework for those shitty bunk beds they'd been sleeping in, and like a circle Tucker's vision expands to see shaking hands around the pipe and Wash behind it with his hand on Caboose's shoulder and it's _Caboose_ and there's a fucking pipe in his gut-

"Tucker, find the medkit. It fell off the wall, it's in the room somewhere." Wash's voice is cold but not as cold as earlier and he has one hand around the base of the pipe, the entry wound, and it's shiny and dark all over the fingers of his gloves- "Tucker! Medkit!"

Tucker finds the medkit and brings it over, knows what Wash is probably going to ask for and drops down next to Caboose and doesn't listen to the way his breath shakes inside his helmet next to the mic, the way he's whining in the back of his throat like some kind of fucking wounded dog. He's known Caboose for years, for _years._ This isn't happening.

He presses the biofoam pen into Wash's hand and Wash tucks it beneath his leg on the ground. "Hold him down," Wash says and he does something Tucker doesn't expect, something he'd figured had been beaten or torn out of Wash ages ago, a hand on Caboose's helmet and patting him. "This is gonna hurt, buddy," Wash says all quiet and Tucker presses down on Caboose when Wash grabs the pipe and pulls it out between seconds. Caboose jerks away from them and probably would've taken Tucker's head off if the punch had connected. Tucker's reflects on how that scream just now had sounded like the one he'd heard over and over when Gary gunned Caboose down in the tank in those fucking time loops; Wash's shiny wet hands leave smears on the biofoam as he squirts it into the open wound and Caboose cries, squirming away from them and Tucker has to hold him down again and feel like a fucking monster.

"Wash," he tries to say, but it just sounds like noise to his own ears and Wash looks up at him.

"He'll be okay," Wash says, but Tucker doesn't know how far to trust that.

"Sorry Caboose," Tucker says, but Caboose is out like a light and he's dead weight that he and Wash both have to lift to try and get him to more stable ground. They carry him not in silence, because the fires still burn and the alarms still scream and scream.

* * *

The exit they find from the ship isn't a door and it's stupid that _that_ is one of the disturbing things that sticks with Tucker after seeing hot pilot chick with half of her skull mushed beneath a twenty-ton support beam. Maybe it's disturbing because Tucker is used to seeing spaceships whole, but this one is most definitely in half because they're sliding along over tile and steel and then all of a sudden they're on grass and Wash's helmet lamp catches on some green stuff. Leaves.

Wash helps Tucker lean Caboose against a wall and somehow produces a rifle from somewhere, how the fuck did he even find one, of _course_ he'd find a fucking gun when Carolina and Church are still missing and it's looking more and more likely that they're dead as time passes. Wash heads out into the blackness and the green and Tucker watches his headlamps disappear between two gigantic leaves that look like those elephant ear plants from Earth, but with purple in the middle.

Sarge and Simmons let Grif down too and they all sit there, half inside of a crashed spaceship and half out, waiting for the only competent soldier among them to come back and somehow fix the gigantic problem of a _fucking spaceship_ falling into a planet when it's supposed to be flying them _back fucking home._

Wash comes back and tells them it's safe to take off their helmets. Atmo won't melt their faces off and there's apparently a nitro-oxygen mix whatever, Tucker stops listening after 'safe to take off your helmets' because he's finding the seals and ripping the goddamn thing off in a second, stumbling onto the grass and throwing up.

"That's fucking gross," Grif says from somewhere past the rushing in his ears and either his voice is seriously fucked up or Tucker's hearing is fucked up because he sounds like he gargled gravel. Tucker just concentrates on taking deep breaths and not dry-heaving. They don't even have any fucking water he can use to wash out his mouth.

He feels a touch on the back of his head and jerks away, throws out an arm and Wash holds up a hand until Tucker relaxes again. He parts Tucker's locs and touches a spot that makes Tucker flinch because it stings like fucking HELL. "You probably have a concussion," Wash says as one would read the newspaper. _Stock prices are down. The presidential candidates are gonna start touring on Friday._

"No shit," Tucker gasps, finding his helmet and manually turning on the helmet lamps so he can see the puddle of sick he absolutely doesn't want to lie on when he rolls over in the leaves. There's barely anything, which is almost disappointing; it felt like he'd ejected his entire small intestine.

Wash had found dry wood somewhere and they get a fire going, which is almost hilarious in its absurdity considering how much fucking fire is on the ship. They get Caboose and the Reds get Grif over to the fires to lie them down. Wash asks Simmons and Sarge for a volunteer to stand guard while he goes back into the ship and Sarge stands up immediately, takes the rifle Wash passes over to him with only a little grumbling ( _long-range my ass_ ) and stands at the edge of the fire, staring into the woods.

Tucker looks over and sees Simmons without a helmet for the first time in a while. He forgot how creepy the guy's red glowing cyborg eye was, especially in the dark. "Grif okay?" Tucker asks, not because he cares (he does) but because he needs to hear the voices of other people before he starts thinking about how many of them have to be dead on that ship.

"Grif is fucking dying, thanks," says Grif tiredly and Simmons gently eases his helmet off.

"Don't," Simmons mutters, and that's all of it but it must be enough for Grif to understand because he doesn't talk again as Simmons starts looking for bumps through his hair. Married. Fucking married.

Simmons finishes and looks over at Tucker then at Caboose beside him, who hasn't moved the entire time because people who have blacked the fuck out from pain tend not to do that. "What about Caboose?" Tucker can see Simmons eyeballing the stark white-yellow of the sealing biofoam puffing out of his gut, like stuffing spilling from a teddy bear.

"He had a-" _half a skull beneath a support beam, a bathtub-worthy puddle of blood seeping through cracks in white armor_ "-pipe," Tucker manages, strangled, and he wishes that the panic could've fucking waited a few more hours before setting in, "stuck in him. Wash yanked it out and patched it. Said he'd be fine."

Simmons' voice is sympathetic and Tucker realizes that out of all of them, this nerd probably knows best what it's like to be so fucking freaked out that you want to just find the nearest cliff and run at it. "If it didn't hit any organs he should be. Biofoam will just degrade as the wound heals itself."

"Yeah," Tucker says, because he knows how biofoam works thanks Simmons, but he rests a hand on Caboose's helmet anyway. He takes a minute to look over them; five shitty soldiers from a shitty little canyon. They're missing a couple; Donut because he stayed behind, and Church because he...hadn't. Sarge hasn't move from where he's keeping watch and the silence is unnerving, but they're all just a few words away from breaking, he thinks, and Simmons keeps a hand on Grif at all times and Tucker would call that gay as hell if he wasn't doing the same for Caboose.

A lump sticks in his throat but this one doesn't make him want to throw up. People call them lucky. They heard it a lot during the press conference, about how they were lucky to have survived everything they had. That there were only so many times they could get by with the skin of their teeth.

Tucker had wanted to haul off and punch the guy who'd said that. What the fuck did he know? What the fuck would that dickhole fucking reporter know about what they'd been through? None of them knew that Church, the one from the canyon, he was fucking _dead_. No getting by with the skin of _his_ teeth. He didn't fucking know that they'd all been almost killed at least once a piece, he didn't know about Donut being deaf in one ear from that fucking grenade, he didn't know about Simmons' cyborg bits and Grif's Y-scars from where Sarge had cracked his chest cavity open to save him. He didn't know about Caboose's broken fucking head, didn't know about the shiny-skin spiderwebs all up and down Tucker's side from that rocket O'Malley had hit him with, or the scars from where Junior had come out. He doesn't know about _any_ of what they went through, and that fucking white, cue-ball tub of butter prick wants to sit in that fucking folding chair and sit there and tell them that they're _lucky_ and that it can't last forever?

Tucker probably would've climbed over the table and torn the guy's shitty mustache off if Wash hadn't rested a hand on his arm and said in that _I know fourteen ways to kill you from here_ voice Tucker's come to know and appreciate, "I think we probably have enough luck for a few more close calls." Fatalist, play-it-safe, you-guys-don't-have-to-go paranoid ex-ops Agent Washington.

Tucker blinks and he's back by the fire. The sky is getting lighter past the trees. He looks down at Caboose, waits until he's sure that's his chest rising and falling and not a trick of the fire and then lays down beside his teammate to try and get some sleep.

* * *

Tucker wakes up to voices. His body hurts like that one night after he got jumped by the boyfriends of that one bachelorette party, but with less of the smug satisfaction of having seen no less than six different pairs of tits. There's no tits involved here. Just a mouth that tastes like bile and a crack in his skull.

"I can't believe they're all alive." Wash.

"Me either." And _that's_ Carolina. Tucker rolls over then to look at them but something catches his eye; Church's tiny avatar is floating a few inches above Caboose's chest.

"You look like shit, Tucker."

"Thanks," Tucker rasps. Wash crouches at his other side and holds something out and it takes Tucker's bruised brain a few seconds too long to realize it's a canteen. Water had never tasted so good.

Church must have seen something in the set of his expression because he turns to face him and vanishes his sniper rifle, pulling up a data display with a wave of a tiny hand. "Just monitoring his vitals. He'll be fine. Wound's already started healing."

"Church is hanging out in my body because we are bessst friends," Caboose murmurs sleepily.

"Oh yeah and we doped him up to the gills."

"I love Church so much...!"

Tucker looks over at Carolina. "Where were you?"

Carolina folds her arms. "Trapped. But we're fine." She says that a lot now, Tucker noticed; 'we.' Not just 'me' or 'I,' but like she and Church are a pair, a unit. Maybe they are. That was how the project was supposed to be, wasn't it?

"Everyone else on the ship is dead," Wash tells him. Sarge looks up from across the fire. Tucker hadn't even realized he was awake. "We're the only survivors."

“Holy shit," says Tucker, for lack of anything better to say.

He says it again for the extra emphasis. "Holy fucking shit."

Maybe that prick reporter was onto something after all.

* * *

Carolina and Wash had scrounged up a bunch of supplies and they spend the better part of the day immobile and trying to keep food down, as well as categorizing their injuries from 'most fucking awful' to 'not as awful as it could be.' Caboose was the worst with his pipe-in-the-gut situation, but plenty of biofoam and painkillers was helping with that. 

Grif and Tucker both had knots on their heads; Grif also had a twisted knee and Simmons might've had a slipped disc if his spine had still been 100% bone. As it was he just had something bent out of place, and Sarge just kicked him in the back until something clicked and he could stretch without pain.

Sarge declared loudly and confidently that he was completely unharmed and he'd actually been telling the truth, but it had still been hilarious to see Carolina and Wash forcefully holding him down as they stripped his armor and checked because the old coot couldn't be trusted not to lie in an effort to look better than Blue Team.

Carolina said she was fine but she and Wash didn't even so much as take off their helmets even once, which was both comforting and really off-putting. Bunch of supersoldier maniacs.

Tucker, for the most part, learned how to put the ship crash and the dead bodies he saw neatly into that stack of 'shit I will refuse to pay attention to for the rest of my life' that he keeps somewhere in a dusty corner of his mind. He wakes up out of breath sometimes but he thinks he's doing pretty fucking well, all things considered.

Wash looks up at the shell of the ship and around at the canyon and declares this as good a spot to set up camp as any. Sarge immediately sequesters himself away at the opposite end of the canyon and demands Grif and Simmons go with him. Wash doesn't fight him on it.

Caboose is fifty times more annoying on painkillers because he never shuts up, but he also apparently seems to really like Tucker when he's high as balls so Tucker spends the time getting Caboose to apologize for all the dickhead things he's done to him in the past as entertainment until Washington comes along to ruin his fun.

Carolina takes Church back when it becomes clear that Caboose is out of danger and they go for long, long walks that they sometimes don't come back from for almost a full day. Tucker is too tired to be pissed off at this point, sick of Church latching onto whatever shred of the Freelancer Project he can find and abandoning the rest of them for it. It's an old hat.

Caboose gets up and walking around and Sarge somehow gets a shitton of metal plating to the other side of the canyon to prop together like a house of cards. He calls it Red Base.

Washington starts to categorize their supplies and get on Tucker's case about waking up at the same time every day, like he _doesn't_ have a concussion (okay, so it's not even really that bad anymore but it's the principle of the thing) and getting him to help cart supplies around like some kind of fucking manservant.

Wash doesn't have him help remove the bodies from the ship though. That's a plus, at least.

It's not until Caboose is up and walking around again that Tucker notices Carolina and Church have been gone for two days instead of one, this time.

And it's not until Grif can walk without a limp that Tucker notices they've been gone for five.

Caboose is given tentative permission to start lifting things and immediately gives Washington a heart attack by flipping over their brand new tank with his bare hands, and Carolina and Church haven't come back for over two weeks.

"They're not coming back, are they?" Tucker asks one night as Wash is doling out MREs.

Wash looks at him, then away. "No." He peels open his meal and pops the seals on his helmet. "Probably not."

Tucker's going to comment on that -say something about Church being a fucking prick and leaving _again_ or something about Carolina getting her jollies by disturbing their tenuous peace or maybe something even meaner, about how Freelancers showing up anywhere must be like the space age version of a red sun at dawn- but then Wash is taking off his helmet and Tucker realizes it's the first time he's ever seen the guy's face and it reminds him of something, a little. _Hang on. Tucker, are you black?_

"You have a fucking assload of freckles," Tucker says as he sits across from Wash at the table, and watches Washington go bright fucking red. And his MRE tastes like shit and his head is aches sometimes, and Caboose had ended up hurting himself with that tank fiasco and has to stay in bed for another three days until Wash is satisfied that the bleeding's stopped. And Sarge is always barking orders across the canyon and Simmons and Grif's bickering echoes off the walls and maybe it's not desert-hot and maybe the sun _does_ set here on this mystery planet but it's so, so close sometimes.

Something like a temporary sense of contentment settles in Tucker's chest. There's alarms going off in his head, muffled but there, and they make him think that he should be doing something about this, about the quiet that's laying between he and Wash that's way more comfortable than it should be but he's not doing shit right now, not now. Right now he's going to take his time and rest.

**Author's Note:**

> SKYPE FIC. sorry for any typos or strange wording, it's all unedited because i'm saving my energy for other stuff.
> 
>  
> 
> Me: i'd even started this as hurt the cutie because i love caboose in distress but tuckington burst in like the fucking koolaid man  
> I will never again emerge from this tuckington hell  
> i live here now
> 
> [ablankshot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ablankshot/pseuds/ablankshot): welcome to my crib
> 
> Me: thanks it's nice here  
> i like the kitchen


End file.
